Making this base is easier than you might think. You can buy plasticard sheets shaped like a crater field from many Hobby Stores. Take a square of this sheet, turn it upside-down, and press it into a bed of Green Stuff (no glue needed). Once it dries, clean up the sides with a hobby knife. If you can't get Plastruct, try pressing a rough, wet stone into the putty.

As for painting the example above, we used Chaos Black with a Codex Grey drybrush. For the lava, we built up from Blood Red to Blazing Orange, with a few Chaos Black lines added afterwards to suggest cooling fractures.

Cut out a very thin slice of insulation foam (really watch your fingers) and glue it to a base with white glue. Trim the edges to fit the base. Draw out a pattern with a felt-tipped pen. Trace over these lines with a hobby knife and then a dull pencil to widen the incisions. Press a rough rock into the foam to transfer the texture. Add small piles of debris made out of gravel and sand. Seal the entire base with watered-down white glue before priming the model to avoid melting the foam with a spray paint.

Black Gobbo fans will know this tip already – wood chips make excellent "rocks" for scenery. Find an appropriately sized chip and glue it to the base with superglue. Add some sand and gravel to the chip to give it an earthy look.

The beauty of wood ships is that they are perfect for drybrushing. Just work your way up from dark to light.

The goal of this base is to look like it has been ravaged by fire or has suffered an explosion. Add sand to your base like normal, but also add a few scrap-metal style bitz over the sand. Paint the base as you would normally. Then, go back over the burnt areas with a heavy drybrush of Chaos Black. If you want to take it a step farther, give it a coat of Weathering Powder to enhance the scorched look.

You can add a small stream of water to any base with a little Green Stuff. Just add a pair or parallel, raised ridges to create a channel. To get a more natural feel, consider pressing a few large pebbles into the banks, along with other detritus in the stream bed. As for the water, you can imitate a thin trickle with gloss varnish. Just add a good amount of the varnish to the channel and allow it to dry. For the example above, we painted the stream bed with Fiery Orange to get a wet-clay feel.

Press a flattened sheet of Green Stuff onto your base. Smooth out any fingerprints now. Take a sculpting tool or hobby knife and make a series of lines in the putty like that shown above – you're going for the cracked-mud look. Adding a bleached animal skull will help hammer home the parched-earth look. For the example above, we drybrushed the base with Dark Flesh, Bubonic Brown, Kommando Khaki, Bleached Bone, and then Skull White.

Similar to the "Snow-Covered Field" base shown on the previous page, this base takes advantage of twigs to simulate fallen trees. Break them down to fit on your base and glue them down with white glue. Flock and paint the base as normal, though you don't have to paint the logs as they look pretty good already. If you don't like the "au natural" look, you can stain the ends of the wood with Brown Ink to bring out the details. Then, drybrush the entire log with Catachan Green to suggest lichen and other forest rot.

Cut down a stick or twig to look like a stump. Place a lump of putty on the base and push in this stump – shape the putty to blend with stump and look like roots. Add small snakes of putty so they radiate from the stump and shape them into a root system. Make sure they look like they're plunging into the ground like a normal tree. Cut them with a wet hobby knife to look like bark. Once the putty dries, flock and paint the base as normal.